Books of The Times; Hapless Writer

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: November 7, 1987

Henry Babbacombe, the unfortunate hero of Malcolm Bradbury's delightful new novel, is a not-so-distant relative of William Boot, Evelyn Waugh's hapless journalist in ''Scoop.'' Like Boot, Henry has heretofore led a quiet, even somnambulent life in the distant countryside; and like Boot, he suddenly finds himself thrust into the spotlight of a hectic new life - thanks to a series of ridiculous events. Boot, you may remember, found himself trading his column, ''Lush Places'' (featuring essays on such momentous subjects as the badger and the great crested grebe), for an overseas post as a war correspondent, and the transition that Henry is forced to make is no less jarring: after years of being ''an author virtually unknown, even to himself,'' he's suddenly plunged into the brave new world of British television.

Henry, we're told, has been living in a tiny and depressing hill village in the north of England where he is a ''Lecturer in English and Drama in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies'' at a small provincial university. In his spare time he holes himself up in a gloomy garden shed and composes his novels - novels that have been described as ''busty and bouncy with Beckettian overtones'' and ''paradigmatically intertextual and parodically postmodern.'' ''The first,'' Henry says, ''is called 'Numen,' the second 'Composition 2' and the third 'Composition 4' There was one in between that was never published.'' It's not an exciting life, but Henry apparently derives great pleasure from such activities as grading papers on ''Middlemarch'' and writing essays on the later work of Harold Pinter.

Why is Henry, of all people, summoned to the glass towers of Eldorado Television? Well, it seems his agent has been sleeping with Jocelyn Pride, Eldorado's head of drama plays and series, and has mentioned Henry's name. Jocelyn, on his part, has been trying to follow the orders of his boss, Lord Mellow, to find ''a new writer who writes like a dream in a prestigious way.'' And Lord Mellow has been trying to find a way to resuscitate his embattled company, which like the rest of Britain, is struggling through the 1980's.

In the wake of a disaster with Eldorado's last project - the world-famous actor Sir Luke had declined to play a nude scene as Gladstone -Lord Mellow has come to have a clear idea of what he doesn't want. He doesn't want ''another big country house,'' he doesn't want ''any more End of Empire,'' he doesn't want ''Newcastle or anything depressing.'' What he does want is ''contemporary reality, strong hero, elegant locations,'' something ''artistic, realistic, visual, luminous, conceptual,'' something, in short, ''that will transform the entire history of the television drama serial.'' ''I want art,'' he tells Henry, ''I want feeling. I want worldwide sales and likeable people. I want it shot in a lush foreign location where you can get malt whiskey.''

Henry dutifully sets about working on his script, and after much agonizing, he manages to produce several pages full of ''moody moods and atmospheric atmospheres'' (''indescribable menace,'' ''unbearable tension,'' ''erotic anticipation,'' etc.) It's almost entirely devoid of character and plot, but the Eldorado people are undaunted. A director is hired, costumes are ordered, a location (Japan) and title (''Serious Damage'') are chosen. Airline tickets are purchased, trucks are hired and food is catered.

Gradually the Eldorado production team pieces together a story (a melodrama about an Englishwoman who meets a samurai during the war), and Henry is packed off to execute their directives. ''Nothing held stable,'' he discovers, ''nothing stayed the same, as it did with novels. The Japanese samurai had somehow become an old Scots ghillie. The great country house had somehow become a castle on a foreign lake. New ideas came from nowhere, had their time, then ended up back in nowhere.'' Needless to say, things only get worse after the movie starts shooting on location in Switzerland.

Some of Mr. Bradbury's more farcical scenes (including several that involve Lord Mellow's penchant for dressing and undressing during meetings) are so broad that they disrupt the flow of the novel, and other jokes about the television industry's venality will doubtless strike the reader as familiar. But while ''Cuts'' lacks the narrative richness of such earlier Bradbury novels as ''The History Man'' and ''Rates of Exchange,'' it fulfills its own more modest ambitions with lots of comic verve and well-aimed malice.

In passing, Mr. Bradbury manages to work every possible variation on his title into the story. Besides learning how to ''cut'' from scene to scene, Henry discovers how easily his entire script may be ''cut'' by ruthless editors and producers. He learns that television people like to ''cut and run,'' that they're practiced in the art of ''cutting their losses''; and even though he feels he's ''cutting something of a dash'' when he's riding in one of their limousines, he begins to think that maybe he's not ''cut out'' for their world. What the television industry and his old university share, however, is pressure toward ''cutting down.'' Indeed, in Mr. Bradbury's capable hands, contemporary England, with its dwindling resources and diminished hopes, becomes a veritable world of ''cuts.''